Romain Pepy

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Paris-Sud, Office National d'Études et de Recherches Aérospatiales

Papers

Total Citations

132

H-Index

About

Romain Pepy is a leading researcher in robotics and autonomous navigation, specializing in safe and reliable path planning under uncertainty. His work focuses on developing algorithms that guarantee safety for mobile robots and vehicles operating in complex, uncertain environments. Pepy’s most influential contribution, "Safe Path Planning in an Uncertain-Configuration Space using RRT" (81 citations), pioneered the integration of extended Kalman filters with Rapidly-exploring Random Trees to enable car-like robots to navigate indoor spaces while accounting for localization errors. He further advanced robust planning through "Reliable Robust Path Planning with Application to Mobile Robots" (23 citations), which ensures safety despite bounded model uncertainties. Pepy also made notable strides in optimal motion planning for non-holonomic systems, deriving necessary conditions for minimum-length paths in heterogeneous environments using Pontryagin’s maximum principle ("Shortest paths for the Dubins' vehicle in heterogeneous environments," 15 citations). His interdisciplinary approach extends to aerospace applications, as demonstrated in "Missile trajectory shaping using sampling-based path planning" (11 citations), where he combined Dubins’ curves with sampling-based planners for hybrid nonlinear systems. With a career dedicated to merging theoretical rigor with practical safety guarantees, Pepy’s work remains essential reading for researchers tackling uncertainty in autonomous systems.